Part 7

Then, as in a vision, I beheld a fair prospect before me, and in the centre of its green beauty arose two hills, from whose separate summits the voices ruled perennially, showering blessings, healing sorrow, banishing care, cheering and solacing the earth. Now the weak needed not to rely on the strong; and pity and protection were scarcely asked or given; for music, "the most divine striker of the senses,"--music alone was the arbitress of the world. And all day, past twilight into the deep gloom, were the voices singing, not incapable of being wearied, but revivified forever by the smiles and tears of pilgrims who departed from the hill-top with hearts made whole.

I marked that the little children were drawn frequently to the abode of the melancholy voice, because it was soft and weird, like a gypsy mother's lullaby, or the rustle of aspens in serene weather. Thither also came youth, nursing its first grief with wilful indulgence, and manhood, yearning for summer melodies that should soothe all unrest, and close "tired eyelids over tired eyes." But I knew the babes were there only because of the sweet, curious affinity of childhood with sombre influences; and the young palmers, through some sophistry of love and honor; and the strong workers, overwrought, since there was no courage left for self-invigoration, and no guide to help them towards the city of the cordial voice, whither they should have turned. One I saw coming forth from the field, with a scroll under his arm, pale and worn with "glimpses of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch," who stood a moment, rapt in rash delight at the voice which betokened tears and infinite longing and regret; and who, straightway remembering that the poet's mission is gladness, incessant belief and prophecy of good, betook him, albeit with a sigh, to that other abiding-place, where he might learn of the happy voice. All the afflicted, with wild and doleful steps, sought to climb the dolorous mountain towards the setting sun; and often a friend's strong hand intervened, and led them, rather, with inspiring speech, into the land of healing. I watched, time on time, soldiers marching to the wars, sustained by the glad voice, and hastening forwards with its spell upon them like a consecration; and again, the weary troops returning, with tattered colors and broken ranks, pausing in the lovely courts of the grave voice, to chant with it a song of memory and reparation and thanksgiving. I came to understand, though but slowly and confusedly, that the entire universe was swayed by these voices; and that, while each was best in its holy office, the strong voice was that which nerved us to our duty, and the kind voice that which rewarded us for duty done. Always within hearing of them, we travel towards the ampler day, loyal to one until we have merited the loving offices of the other; holding them sweetly correlative, even as are labor and repose, or life and death.

So soon as I was filled with the glory and significance of the voices, they faded imperceptibly away, and I heard them no longer. Moreover, I found my lifted eye resting anew on the village church, where the dying light fell across the aisles, and the bare clematis-vine waved at the near window; and whence the last worshipper had departed. Had I indeed been on a strange road, and among strange sounds? It may be that even in my day-dream I might have called my beloved singers by their earthly names; and that so I might this hour, were it not for a clinging scruple. For I have been made wiser, and know verily that both are angels, and that one is Joy, and one is Peace.

SWEETHEART.

IN a mood made half of tenderness, and half of laughter, I begin to speak of her: in tenderness, since to name her is a joy; and in laughter, for that I cannot for sheer inability keep the knowledge of her to myself; partly because she had many liegemen and lovers who sung of her aloud to the tell-tale winds before I found my way to her blessed door, but most of all because it would strangely savor of injustice to appropriate so sweet a thing as her favor, without sharing it with the first comer found worthy. Therefore this delight of mine is no more mine than thine, and his, and theirs, and ours; and who would have it otherwise?

She dwelt of old in a tranquil vale apart from villages, with little society save that of the scarlet tanager and the periwinkle-blossom. Such visitors as entered the "piny aisles" that led into her presence, were those only who reverenced her truly. She could not abide harshness and scorn, and they were always gentle; she sat in her fragrant solitude as one that broods on mysteries, and they, in sympathy, sat beside her, one by one, and spake ever after with the enthusiasm and the unworldliness of children. But the immaculate stillness which she chose for her dwelling has long been assailed. Revellers came from the city to riot in her gardens, and to disport themselves in her halls. Railway trains thundered hourly over against her hallowed threshold. Often and often, in passing by, you may yet hear the sound of inharmonious voices, and catch a glimpse of her fair downcast brow, as she looks mutely out upon the invaders.

Amid this "heavy change" she is unchanged and unchangeable. Her pure serenity was a sharp rebuke to our doubting, when we first gathered around her, after the dread of missing the charm which had made her dear. We had known many of her kindred, and each of them, howsoever lovely, seemed coarsened and cheapened to the sensitive eye, by over-much familiarity with crowds. But our celestial lady moves like Penelope, amid throngs of her false suitors, with thoughts disentangled from their clamor, in forbearance and patience and hope and honor, the ineffable depths of her nature evermore unjarred. Long ago, and in the beginning of our affection for her, we twain found her asleep in the flooded noonday sunshine, having at her feet and at her head a sombre guard of pines; and behind them, the vagrant "glad light green" of spring; and again, above their topmost pennon, irregular amethystine clouds, visionary mountain-ranges, that climbed, peak on peak, to front

"Thee, Lincoln, on thy sovereign hill."

We flung ourselves in the young grass, and delayed there, lest our footsteps should break that exquisite slumber; and so awed, and so rejoicing, looked upon her whom we had travelled far to see. It was her exceeding comeliness that made the responsive gleam dance from eye to eye; but it was her sanctity, virginal as when the Spirit first breathed upon it and bade it be, that held our lips hushed then, our memory secure and deferent ever after. Over this unforgotten glory of ours, Saint Francis of Assisi might have breathed his soft hymn of thanksgiving for "my sister, who is very humble, useful, precious, and chaste." Crime should be wary of her bright presence; weariness should forget its landmarks, dreaming beside her; nobleness overwrought and embittered should take courage, and trust the world anew, as by a miracle, for her sake.

Many, many times, but especially at the breaking of the frosts, when sap begins to thrill in the naked boughs, comes the desire to approach her peaceful abiding-place, and learn, by moon or sun, what more of winsomeness or splendor one year hath brought her. What more can it ever bring? For her soul is crystalline and candid, and on her forehead shines perpetual youth. She is one of the touch-stones of our finer selves. Verily, with this secluded friend of friends, "in profanity, we are absent; in holiness, near; in sin, estranged; in innocence, reconciled." Her history is in hearts rather than in books; her unprofanable beauty is the special care of heaven; and we New Englanders that love her, and sometimes come about her, harping her praises with sweet extravagance, have no name for her which men shall recognize but that of WALDEN WATER.

ON THE BEAUTY OF IDLENESS.

IDLENESS is harder to distinguish than the philosopher's stone. Stupidity you can put your finger on; and so with sullenness, day-dreaming, or bovine lassitude. But idleness may link itself with any, all, or none of these. It is the will-o'-the-wisp among human characteristics. You avoid it, being hoodwinked as to its presence in your vicinage; you bear with it in others, when your tolerance is veritably bestowed on something very different. Small wonder if you wax so wise and so finical that you shall swear, sooner or later, in the phrase of a certain friend of ours, that "there never was no sich" a thing!

What astronomy is to astrology, or chemistry to the alchemy of old times, that is idleness, so called, the most useful and edifying spectacle in the world, to idleness criminal. Idleness, simon-pure, from which all manner of good springs like seed from a fallow soil, is sure to be misnamed and misconstrued, even when it is stuck, like a bill-post, in the public eye. A thinking person, the schoolmaster will allow you, is barely to be called idle; but for that exaggeration of thought, the almost tidal stand-still between activities, which belongs to Dunce on the back bench, he has no more respect than can fit in the circumference of his rod. Dunce, nevertheless, may grow up to be called Oliver Goldsmith, or Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Tommy, who stops on his way to market, to sit on a stone wall and plan a nest-robbing, indulgent passers-by shall consider busy, though misguided; but young Galileo or Columbus, planning nothing whatsoever, drifting into the mental hush and stillness whence astonishing ideas arise, are sure to be set up as a couple of intolerable wool-gatherers. A boy may crouch before the fire, looking through the kettle steam at "one far-off divine event," and be complimented on his prospective value to society, or ironically offered a penny for the contents of his ridiculous head.

Thoreau put his own case, in the illustration of the man who roves all day through a pine-forest, rejoicing in its height and shade and fragrance, and is heralded far and wide as a lazy good-for-nought, as opposed to the sober and industrious citizen who betakes himself, axe in hand, to hew the giants down. Every township has its business men, but Mr. Henry Thoreau was, without exception, the best American idleness-man on record. He floated about in his dory, the breathing reflection of Nature in its wealth of detail, inflated with pride because he had not ever chosen to stand behind a counter! Yet he "got his living by loving," and may be suspected of having grained his name, diamond-like, on that window which looks out eastward on the Atlantic. How else was half the wisdom of the Orient cradled, but in the solemn Buddhist, coiled up, with his sealed eyelids, his shut teeth, and parted lips, contemplating nothing with tremendous suavity? The secret of handsome leisure is a fast secret now, indeed. The ancients have not transmitted it. Who can think of a breathless Athenian, save in the hour of battle, or of manly sport? Pericles laid the fold of his garment, so, deliberately over his arm, and steadied himself against some calm assurance, "marchyng," as the old chronicler said of Queen Bess, "with leysure." Repose is stamped on every statue the Greeks left us. It is in their lyrics, however joyous; in their large drama; in their golden history. They did nothing in feverish haste. Perhaps it may not be rash to acknowledge that they were reasonably clever, and managed their terrene concerns with some intelligence. There is over-much stir around us: mountains heaving, cities building, seasons racing by, governments shifting and turning at the four corners of the earth. It is the modern miracle that the contemporaneous growing lilies have not lost their blessedness, in striving to toil and spin.

Wherever a soul keeps energy in reserve, and a little healthful languor dominant, a patch of Arcadia is yet to be found.

"Oblivion here thy wisdom is, Thy thrift, the sleep of cares; For a proud idleness like this Crowns all thy mean affairs!"

When the familiar Yankee angel, Nervous Prostration, brushes you with his wing, Arcadia withers away. Your holiday siesta, after that, is not genuine. Of idleness you cannot be conscious, even as innocence is no longer itself when it knows its name. Therefore no week-day preacher need exhort you to be idle, ladies and gentlemen, as often as you can afford it. He can only cast an eye along your ranks, and discovering one or two of the elect, who shall remind him of boats swinging gently at their moorings, piously hold his tongue and go on his way with thanksgiving.

DE MOSQUITONE.

IF the Bruce loved his instructive spider, for which history does not vouch, why should not the public mosquito be dear to desponding minds, as a yet more victorious exponent of the value of perseverance and a set purpose? Who hath circumvented her? She laughs at all dissuasion. She evades the soldier's gun, the physician's potion; the Sophi with his fleet cannot drive her away, nor the Czar impale her in any dungeon. What the mosquito came hitherward to do, that she does. The "moral runs at large."

It is all very well to abuse her; one gets a poor, childish satisfaction out of such terms of endearment as can be readily bestowed: unfledged Tamerlane! disturber of the sanctities of night! Satan of summer joys!--and so on. What avails all that? We have to bow our necks, and endure her diabolics. She is an evil which the Constitution cannot remedy; and as we are given to understand that she does not speak English, no protest formulated in that tongue can pierce her horny and tyrannical heart.

The believing soul may picture her primarily in some sweet, decorous frolic through the glades of Eden (for charity would even accord to her the possibility of a state of first innocence), frisking airily with birds-of-Paradise, and given wholly to honorable practices. Ah! but what man is proof against violent thoughts of Father Noah, who, when she had already entered on her vein-glorious, flesh-loving, back-biting, and peace-disturbing career, gave her the shelter of his house through troublous days, and, like the short-sighted philanthropist that he was, cursed the four continents in befriending two obstreperous insects?

I cannot consider any cosmic force more eminently practical. The poet lauds a river-bank, and sheds on a grove the starry fascinations of rhetoric; it is none other than Mosquito who induces you to hate and shun what you would fain be persuaded to consider fair. She it is who can make the greenest landscape odious, and the calm haunts of trees vociferous as if all Bedlam were let loose under their outspread arms. She is your best circumnavigator. I cannot picture to my wildest speculations a place where she is not. Nowhere is she an exile, but hath her native bog all over Christendom. She holds her cannibalistic orgies wherever human foot hath trodden. In that Land which, geographically, is No Man's, methinks she prowleth still, looking for him. Howsoever arrant a folly it be to ignore so great an influence on our personal behavior, so huge a factor in the reckoning of men's woes, little enough is recorded of this wretched anthropophaginian. Dante did weakly, inasmuch as she figured not as chief tormentor among his perpetually condemned. The cricket, the glow-worm, the ant, the mole, long since found their bards, but no prophetic malediction has fallen from Parnassus on their evil-minded cousin. There must needs be a greater than Milton to pronounce her anathema.

The immense malignity of her disposition is, with superlative cunning, cloaked under her bodily slenderness and aerial grace. What monstrous discrepancy betwixt her and her doings! By what unheard-of perverseness in the natural order is she framed delicately as a kind sunbeam, or a fragment of sea-foam? On the theory of physical degeneracy, we may consider her in the archetypal plan to have been a grim enormity, like Regulus's Bagrada serpent, a candidate of yore for the attentions of some Jack-the-Giant-Killer, who, should he arise to-day, might prove but a clumsy blunderer in face of her impish agilities.

Helpless victim that I am, I look at Mosquito with unmixed awe. I harbor grotesque superstitions, and build up romances in her name. Why not metempsychosis? This marvellous restlessness,--might it not once have been a human thing? What if some world-scourge, like Attila, were pent in these narrow bounds, and sent whirring through space again, on the old, colossal mission of annoyance? Involuntarily I scan Mosquito with no humbler glass than a telescope. Even to the dignity of a malignant planet hath she attained in mine unjaundiced eye. Straightway, as fear building on fear, mount my fancies, memories, speculations, till on their topmost pinnacle flashes the saying of the liberal philosophers, that the immortal principle may not be lacking in the "meanest thing that feels;" and my sole, honest, overwhelming impulse is to forswear the pious Sunday-school hope of becoming an angel, that is, a winged creature, lest in any phase of untried being, Mosquito! I should bear affinity to that which thou art.

----"Execrable shape, That dar'st, tho' grim and terrible, advance Thy miscreated front across my way!"

Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend was it yesterday moved my shuddering lips to quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier spirit?--

"My sprightly neighbor! gone before To that unknown and silent shore, Shall we not meet as heretofore Some summer morning?"

Such is the irony of revenge.

Dread Reminiscence! appalling Probability! disconcerting and inescapable Fact! thou art the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the Never-Reached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. In deference to thee, I salute the hem of a mosquito-net.

In the watches of the night, my soul shall rejoice to behold thy wrathful eye outside.

ON THE GARRET.

"I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the sacred stars do circle me." HENRY VAUGHAN.

THERE survives in certain men a climbing instinct, a persistence, dating from Babel days, which keeps them to the belief that they were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, "neighbors to the sky." Put them down in a city, and they mount, by choice, as by force of circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. These are the garret-dwellers, disburdened, for the most part, of the money-bags of capitalists. Surely, the more a creature is denuded of riches and responsibilities, the lighter his spiritual weight, the fitter he is for nearing the unembarrassed planets. He is no underling. His poverty literally raises him up. He marches, like a conqueror towards some fine, deserted city, into the high places; his castle is over against the morning; and his bare forehead is reared above the hereditary crowns of Europe.

That the rich should be the groundlings, after all, is one of the diverting sarcasms and counter-turns of society. Who would not, rather, stand play-fellow to the sun, and consider the moon's light nothing less familiar than a beneficent household elf, and suffer the companionship of the rainbow and of snows? Distant and faint sounds the thunder of the streets; Teufelsdröckh, and such as he, "sit above it, alone with the stars." Nethermost darkness cannot overtake the denizen of the garret. His matins are over and done while candles still flicker below. The wail of the Banshee reaches not his far-removed ear. No flood in civic highways appalls him; the tramp of armies, likewise, is beneath him, and he overlooks revolutions, undisturbed. For him, perpetually, are ultra-mundane joys, the _choragium_ of the spheres, and the revelations of the shifting air.

The conjurer and the astronomer alike love the "high lonely tower." The painter goes thither for light, the student for contemplation. There, according to international traditions, is the Poor Author perennially to be found,--

"Lulled by soft zephyrs thro' the broken pane."

The Poor Author! The saving leaven of literature! Here is his native heather, and not elsewhere. Here his latitude must be taken. If ghosts revisit their whilom kingdoms, here Otway, Addison, Dryden, Chatterton, Hood, Béranger, flock some time or other. Here you shall brush against the shade of Marvell, who dwelt thus high and thus solitary, when the king's deputies came with unavailing gifts in their hands, to buy his favor; and presently dear Oliver Goldsmith shall turn his homely face upon you, and tell you, in his delightful voice, as he once blurted it out before the elegant circles at Sir Joshua's, how he lived happily among the beggars in Axe Lane! In a garret sat Tasso, whimsically beseeching his cat to lend to his nocturnal labors the guiding radiance of her eyes, having no candle whereby to write his verses. Dickens, who was never a Poor Author, caught, at least, something of his privilege in his "sky-nest," with the clouds and the birds shadowing his study windows in their passage.

As the dwellers in the Happy Valley were daily entertained with tales and songs which treated of their own felicity therein, so we know of nothing more judicious than to sound the praises of the ever-noble garret to the Poor Author, who has an eternal patent on its worth and beauty. The least that can be said of it is that it engenders the philosophy of comment. Its kind soil fosters the spectator and the observer, in default of commoner weed. The Muse, traditionally coy, can be caught there, if anywhere. She has been known to neglect her votaries in proportion to the fattening of their purses and their proximity to the first-floor drawing-room. A poet himself has marked it as a warning:--

"A man must live in a garret aloof ... To keep the goddess constant and glad."

Long residence in its precincts, howbeit, may tend to produce a haughty disregard of the brethren acclimated to lower levels. Your roof-perching hermit, whose lungs are inflated with rude health, scoffs at the genteel ailments accruing below from the largesses of carbonic acid gas. His own dais-like elevation breeds arrogance in him, and patrician scorn; his descent to the vantage-ground of the majority is palpable indeed. He cannot, at most, walk their paths, save, metaphorically, on stilts, like the shepherds of the Landes. He is accustomed to live cheek-by-jowl with Arcturus. A kite or a balloon he acknowledges, but no terrene mail-service or horse-car. Valleys and cellars distress him. He cannot lie on the grass of a summer's day, to watch a colony of ants. He is of a loftier cast of mind, and sighs rather for the shining motes of the Milky Way, "scattered unregarded upon the floor of heaven." We have known him to refuse a June cherry, plucked only amidmost of the tree. What is such a bigot to do, but thrust his tall head back, out of alien air, into his sixth-story Arcady where the Muse sits, waiting for him, on a collapsing chair?

"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans!"

So have we sought the heights, and clove unto them, in orthodox privacy, though lacking our just deserts of the aforesaid lady's favor. Yet do we in nothing reproach thee, eyry of our youth! with thy beloved townish outlook and undusted shelves, save that the tutelary pages born of thee are scarce of so Attic a flavor as our sense of the due sequence of things hath led us to desire.

University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

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